this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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You can be fine with the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism and still favor a wealth cap and abolishing laws like Citizens United that give money undue influence on politics. Extreme wealth concentration actually hurts capitalism by starving the spending economy of money. It's a defect in the system that eventually spoils the system.
Lots of people on Lemmy forget that the choice between Capitalism and Socialism isn't binary. Country picks individual policies that are capitalist or socialist in nature. All of the modern countries are a combination of both. Even USA has certain socialist policies. Most of Europe is roughly equally capitalist and socialist.
It's just making a character build and picking perks. Capitalist policies aren't bad (for the general public) by default. Depending on how and which ones are implemented, they can be beneficial to everybody.
Europe has many more Social policies than the US, but it is nowhere close to equally parts Socialist and Capitalist.
Socialism means that the Workers own the means of production, and there is no country in Europe where that is the case.
Social policies != Socialism.
It's not about strictly "owning", it's about controlling. Control can be achieved in many different ways, including, but not limited to regulations. Socialism is an economic system, of which you can implements certain parts.
I didn't say "social policies". Socialist policies are a more specific subset of social policies, so all socialist policies are social policies, but not all social policies are socialist.
Regarding the European countries' degree of being socialist, it of course depends on the country. But on average, you might be right, and perhaps using "equally" was an exaggeration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism:
I’m not gonna lie, I don’t think a common-good healthcare regulation or whatever housing plans fall under the definition.
Edit: there’s some merit to this you could’ve brought up, e.g. Germany’s mandating by law of some (limited) worker control in firms ≥500 employees in size (wikipedia link). But even that’s breaking with the definition, since it’s not about ownership, but rather a say in leading the company.